At precisely 8:13PM eastern time on the evening of October 28, 2003, a lonely 19-year old schoolboy took to the Internet to complain about the latest love interest who had left him dejected and angry.

“Jessica,” he wrote to the precisely zero people who paid attention to his LiveJournal blog, “is a bitch. I need to think of something to take my mind off her. I need to think of something to occupy my mind. Easy enough, now I just need an idea.”

It took about an 90 minutes… and a fair amount of booze… for inspiration to strike. And by 9:48PM he wrote an updated post, describing his “idea”.

He wanted to hack into the school’s official servers and download the photographs of every student on campus; he would then write a program that would randomly select two of those photos, place them side-by-side on a website, and allow other students to vote on who was more attractive.

At 11:09PM, his new website was complete. He called it FaceMash, and it attracted 22,000 page views in the first four hours.

The website’s creator, of course, is Mark Zuckerberg. And his FaceMash site eventually went on to become Facebook (originally called ‘The’ Facebook).

It was an instant sensation among users and quickly began to attract venture capital firms. Investor Peter Thiel bought 10% of the company for $500,000 the following year, in September 2004.

Three years later it was worth $15 billion. And when the company went public in May of 2012, it was worth more than $100 billion.

Today Facebook’s stock market capitalization is about $350 billion. So investors who bought in at the IPO 12 years ago have made about 3.5x their money, or about 12% per year. That’s a very solid return.

And of course, investors who were able to buy Facebook shares when it was still private are up 20x or more, which is incredible.